Any Fragment More Than I Do
by CitronPresse
Summary: -- He's not apologizing; he's not asking her to forgive him; he's just asking her to understand. One shot set post 6.12. -- Spoilers for 6.11 and 6.12. Pairing: Mark/Lexie.


_I cannot promise  
Any of the things I want to  
But I could not want this  
Any fragment more than I do_

_**Fragment**_, Trespassers William

*

Mark groans softly as he sits down next to her on the bench outside the hospital. It's a sound Lexie had grown accustomed to; turned over in her mind and smiled at the intimacy it let her into; it's a sound, she thinks, that comes from weight training, and long surgeries, and ghosts of feelings inside him that creep into his bones and muscles. He lets it go when he sits down with someone he likes. And she? Well, she had grown accustomed to it.

"Hey," he says, when she doesn't speak, because she doesn't know what to say, and she's finding her way out through the layers of memory.

She nods, tilts her head sideways to half look at him, and he, waiting to catch her eye, half smiles.

"Hey," she finally says. Her voice is flat, weighed down and she wonders if, when he hears it, it passes for the resentment she should (and sometimes does) feel towards him; or whether he can sense, in some way, how the heaviness comes from the lost, accustomed closeness that is so full and so overwhelming, a single ordinary instance, a single casually relieved groan can be broken down into a world of reflection.

She wishes he wasn't sitting here; she wishes he would disappear back into the reality where they pretend they don't know each other anymore and call each other _Dr. Sloan_ and _Grey_; but then, she wishes _she_ could disappear into the reality on the edge of her consciousness where they're sitting here, on this bench, outside the hospital, because they love each other.

(That's the problem with a photographic memory. Everything resonates all the time.)

She sighs.

"Lexie," he says, but doesn't seem to know how to continue, and leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs and dipping his head.

They speak at the same time:

"What do you want?"

"I never had a family."

words vying for space and precedence until his outlast hers and she waits to hear what comes next.

"Not . . . you know . . ." he shifts uncomfortably, "Derek was . . . and his mom, but . . ." He sighs and rubs a hand over the back of his neck. "I never really had a family," he restates, almost rough, from frustration, for emphasis, from all the emotions woven into the statement. She can hear them all, almost feel them. (See? Everything resonates. Especially when it's Mark. She wishes it would stop.)

"Sloan is . . . " He trails off again, then twists sideways on the seat and tries to get her to look at him. She resists (at first); then her eyes are drawn to his and she fights not to get sucked in. He swallows. "Her blood pressure was skyrocketing. And Addison couldn't get the amniotic band around the baby's thigh. And," he shakes his head, "I never had a family and she . . . they . . . they're like a gift, you know?"

Lexie nods, because she does know (even if a part of her she doesn't have much respect for doubts, briefly, that Sloan would be anyone but Mark's idea of a blessing).

He swallows again. "I sleep with people," he says quietly. "When it gets tough . . ." he waves a hand almost helplessly, "I sleep with people." A beat passes while his eyes flicker over hers. "So I slept with Addison. More than once." Another beat; another flicker. "Kind of a lot more than once." He inhales. "I was worried and I was hurting and," he shrugs, "it's what I do."

She doesn't quite know why, but in the reality inside her head, she would reach out and touch him. This is not articulate; this is maybe the least articulate Mark Sloan has ever been around her; but, at the same time, it's maybe the most uniquely expressive he's been in words. He's not apologizing; she knows that and, honestly, she's not sure whether he should or not, or whether she wants him to. But there's a promise of an apology: it's not going to come today, she thinks; but he is, slightly, realigning the reality they can't seem to help sharing even when they're apart. And, for that, she would reach out and touch him.

Just not today.

Instead, she ventures what he refused to accept before, softly at first, but building to something more desperate, until the final words again fall to a whisper she hardly dares make: "I was hurting too. I was hurting and I was drunk and he was there. It was a mistake, it was a big mistake, but he was there and you . . . can't you understand me even a little bit?"

A pause falls between them, then he says, "Yeah," wrenching it out of himself with as much tolerance as he can marshal. "It's just . . . you're Lexie."

"I'm _Lexie_?" Her voice is indignant and almost high pitched with a reflex of self-defense she didn't really want to let out and break the mood. But _she's __**Lexie**_? She can't let that go, so she does a deal between her anger and her memories, and repeats, in a tensely calm whisper, "I'm _Lexie_? Which means what, exactly? That I'm supposed to take all the crap and miss out on all the fun?"

He glances down (he always does that when he's struggling with something and, of course, there's the resonance again; every time she's ever loved his unexpected reticence firing up synapses full of feelings that she can't have now).

"I never really had a family," he says, as though saying it enough times will make her understand, and she's slammed in no uncertain terms between dual realities again: the one that wants to roll her eyes at him; and the one where she knows every nuance of everything he never quite reveals.

"I get that," she says. "I _really_ get that. I just don't get," although she does, she just needs a little binary clarity to take back into the world that, today, has to keep being the real one, "why you're here, telling me this. I mean, you're not apologizing, right? You're not forgiving me. You're not asking me to forgive you, so --"

"I thought you loved me," he says, his eyes haunting hers with all the times he was hurt before he had a choice. "You were supposed to --" But he can't, and she can't either, and they both know that. So he stands up, with a soft groan like the inverse of the one he sat down with, and walks away.

(He never really had a family.)

He's not apologizing (and even calling it a promise is like losing an idea because you're trying too hard to catch it); he's not asking her to forgive him; he's just asking her to understand (something, maybe, he doesn't really understand himself).

And with all the memories and all the resonance and everything she knows without knowing, she almost does.


End file.
